Britain Knew of 2 Suspects in the Killing of a Soldier

Flowers lay in the southeast London neighborhood of Woolwich.Credit
Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

LONDON — British security officials confirmed Thursday that both suspects in the hacking death of an off-duty British soldier were known to MI5, the domestic security agency, in the years before the attack, in which men drove their car into the soldier on a busy London street and then chopped at him with cleavers as he lay prone on the sidewalk.

Twenty-four hours after the attack, with Britain still reeling with shock at its sheer brutality, the victim was identified as a 25-year-old army bandsman and machine-gunner, Lee Rigby, who had served in Afghanistan and was the father of a 2-year-old boy. He had left his barracks in plainclothes to visit his mother, the authorities said.

Security officials said the suspects were radicalized British Muslim men with family origins in Nigeria. One was named by the BBC as Michael Adebolajo, 28, who it said had been raised in a Christian family in Romford, east of London. He converted to Islam in about 2001, and joined a radical Muslim group, Al Muhajiroun, that was banned in Britain in 2010 as an Islamic terrorist organization, notorious for having praised those who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks. The other suspect was not identified.

The two suspects in the killing were under police guard in separate London hospitals, where they were being treated for gunshot wounds inflicted by the police when they were arrested, officials said.

Meanwhile, Scotland Yard’s counterterrorism unit mounted raids on Thursday on six residential addresses that were said to have been linked to the attackers, including one in Romford, one in the London suburb of Greenwich and a third in the Lincolnshire village of Saxilby, 150 miles north of London, where neighbors said some of Mr. Adebolajo’s family members were living in a large, modern home in a new subdivision. Scotland Yard said the raids had led to the arrests of a man and a woman, both 29, whom they would not name, who were suspected of conspiracy to commit murder.

New details of the attack in the southeast London neighborhood of Woolwich on Wednesday compounded the sense of outrage felt in Britain at its savagery.

The killers were described as having rained blows on the inert soldier before dragging his corpse into the street, roaming around and waving off would-be helpers with bloodied hands, cleavers still in their grasp, apparently intent on keeping the body on public display until the police arrived. One of the two men was caught on cellphone video warning bystanders that they would not be safe either until British soldiers were withdrawn from all Muslim lands.

Photo

Ingrid Loyau-KennettCredit
via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

One witness who spoke to the BBC said that the police had opened fire when one of the two attackers, cleaver still in hand, appeared to rush the officers.

The episode appeared to bear some of the hallmarks of “lone wolf” terrorist attacks like the one last month at the Boston Marathon. Involving low-tech weapons and a spontaneity aimed at foiling pre-emptive discovery, they have been propagated in recent years by an array of Islamic militant Web sites that Western security experts have linked to Al Qaeda.

Such attacks have been urged as a means of striking back at Western nations, particularly Britain and the United States, in the face of their success in disrupting terrorist networks with high-technology tools, including drones and satellite- and computer-aided surveillance systems.

After hurrying back to London overnight from a European tour, Prime Minister David Cameron suggested in a statement to reporters that the country should emulate the example of Ingrid Loyau-Kennett, 48, a French-born Cub Scout leader whose actions at the site of the killing earned her hero’s plaudits in the morning newspapers.

In broadcast interviews, Ms. Loyau-Kennett said she had gotten off a passing bus when she saw a body lying in the street, intending to offer first aid. Instead, she said, she came face to face with one of the killers, and kept him discussing motives in a successful bid to distract him until the police arrived.

There was a growing concern that Britain’s security services, after a long chapter of success in disrupting more complex terrorist plots since the transit system bombings in London that killed 52 people and the four bombers on July 7, 2005, might have missed opportunities to head off the Woolwich attack.

In that sense, the Boston Marathon bombings again provided a point of reference. The older of the two brothers accused of that strike, and some of his associates, had drawn the attention of the F.B.I. and other American authorities beforehand, in part through their ties to Chechnya.

Photo

Lee Rigby, 25, was in plainclothes heading to see his mother when he was killed.Credit
Ministry of Defence, via Associated Press

What British security officials knew about the two men held after the London attack remained unclear. But unidentified officials who spoke with British reporters said that both men had appeared on lists of people known to have been involved with Islamic militant groups that have been under surveillance by agencies, including MI5, that form the front line in Britain’s counterterrorist operations.

In his Downing Street statement, Mr. Cameron acknowledged that news coverage of the killing in Britain had included “the point that the two suspects in this horrific attack were known to the security services,” but he could not comment on the investigation. But he added that “in the normal practice in these sorts of cases,” the actions of the security agencies involved would be open to review by two bodies that have formal powers in such matters, the Independent Police Complaints Commission, in the case of Scotland Yard, and a parliamentary body, the Intelligence and Security Committee, in the case of MI5 and MI6, which is the foreign intelligence agency.

Security officials were quoted by the BBC as confirming that Mr. Adebolajo, one of the two suspects in the killing, had come under surveillance in recent years when he attended meetings of Al Muhajiroun, the militant group that was later banned.

The former leader of that group, Anjem Choudary, said in a BBC interview that Mr. Adebolajo had been a regular attendee — “very quiet, very unassuming, very nonviolent” — and that others at the meetings had known him by the pseudonym of Brother Mujahid, an Arabic term that means holy warrior.

He said Mr. Adebolajo had stopped attending meetings a few years ago, shortly before the group was banned.

British security experts noted that several of the militants involved in the 2005 transit bombings had been known to MI5 for years before the attacks, but that MI5 officers had reviewed their cases and decided that they were peripheral figures, apparently not involved in terrorist plotting.

The decision not to keep track of those men, the experts said, may prove to have been similar to the case of Mr. Adebolajo.

MI5 officials have said repeatedly that despite a substantial increase in the agency’s financing and staffing since 2005, it has the resources to actively monitor at any one time only a fraction of the militants who have drawn the agency’s attention.

John F. Burns reported from London, and Alan Cowell from Paris.

A version of this article appears in print on May 24, 2013, on Page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Britain Knew Of 2 Suspects In the Killing Of a Soldier. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe